1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to data protection methods within computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is an increasing need for organizations to protect data that resides on a variety of host devices via some type of data protection application. Data protection applications maybe employed to protect data from loss due to user error, system failure, outages, and disasters, etc. as well as archiving information for regulatory compliance, workflow tracking, etc. For example, data protection applications may schedule and perform various data protection methods such as full backups, incremental backups, replications, snapshots, etc. Different methods may be used in different circumstances. For example, if a user desires to protect a complete volume, a volume backup may be performed in which the entire contents of a particular disk drive are stored as a monolithic backup dataset. Volume backups may provide the advantage of rapid restoration. However, volume backups consume storage resources for data that may not need to be protected. For example, there may be times when protection may be desired for data related to one or more applications only.
An alternative approach to data protection is file-by-file backup. In file-by-file backup, a backup agent may identify a particular application to be protected and convey a copy of only those files that are related to the identified application to a backup medium including any metadata that may be required to restore the application-related files into the context of the application. File-by-file backups may therefore consume less storage space than volume backups. However, restoration from a file-by-file backup may be slower than restoration from a volume backup. Typically, to restore files to an application, the backup files may be copied to a temporary location from which a user may browse, search, or otherwise select files to be restored. While this approach allows for granular recovery of data files, it may be unnecessarily time-consuming.
Backup methods such as those described above may be performed in accordance with the values of a complex variety of configuration parameters. Among these parameters may be the type of resource to be protected, a priority level for the resource, the type of operation to be performed, the type of storage to be used to store a backup dataset, the time and frequency of performing the operation, the type of recovery technology that is to be applied to the resource backup dataset, and retention policies of the backup dataset, etc. A data protection application may store a particular set of values of the above parameters as a data protection policy. Unfortunately, to configure a particular data protection policy, an administrator or other user may be asked to select values for each of these parameters, which may be a time-consuming, complex, and error-prone operation.
In addition, each different data protection application may provide a different subset of the above parameters for configuration. For example, different data protection applications may support different sets of resource types. Some data protection applications may support only a single resource for each policy while others may support multiple resources per policy. Other parameters may be mismatched among data protection applications including support of different backup methods, storage management features, and backup retention features. Further, each different data protection application may have its own terminology for specifying the above parameters. Still further, each different data protection application may have a distinct user interface through which to establish values for these configuration parameters. Configuring a data protection policy may require a user to navigate through numerous dialog windows and correctly configure numerous arcane settings. For large environments, setting up many data protection policies may be a very challenging and tedious task. Moreover, any expertise that an administrator acquires in configuring a first data protection application may not be applicable to other data protection applications.
The above considerations may be rendered especially relevant when it becomes desirable or necessary to migrate data protection from one data protection application to another. Also, it may be difficult to translate existing policies to take advantage of new features of a new or updated data protection application. In view of the above, a more effective system and method for establishing data protection policies and configurations that accounts for these issues are desired.